Once upon a long time ago, when humans still discovering new life forms on the planet instead of destroying them, one wise man decided that there had to be a system wherein all these new findings could be tabulated, recorded and referred to with ease.
Based on what he, his contemporaries and his predecessors had found, he designed a chart where all plants and all animals were placed into two different kingdoms called Plantae and Animalia.
This system worked for years, but with the discoveries of newer creatures, more and more people felt that it needed to be altered. Someone went so far as to say “The Two Kingdom Classification today is like the living world’s prom dress- it can hardly fit!” (Name and address of the commentator withheld at request). So, a gallant man named Robert Whittaker came to this damsel’s aid, and proposed the wider, more accommodating Five Kingdom Classification, accounting for Monera (basically bacteria and wannabe-almost bacteria), Protista (single celled creepy crawlies found on both land and water), Fungi (containing fingi and other things resembling beards), Plantae (for plants) and Animalia (for Animals).
Again, this system worked for a long time, until 1969, when man sent Neil Armstrong and his drinking buddies to the moon. There was a plaque on the space shuttle that bore (in inscriptions) the position of the Earth, the fact that the creature who was in the spaceship was from Earth, and what he looked like. The plaque ran in to trouble with censor boards owing to its vivid depiction of a man and a woman in their birthday suits. While space authorities argued that attire hardly mattered in this grand quest, censor authorities insisted depictions of ourselves look their very best for a good first impression.
Despite all controversy (eventually hushed in favour of the space cowboys), this little plaque was deemed extremely important by NASA “just in case we stumble on to new life forms on the moon on the journey there.” (Name and address of the commentator withheld at request).
This particular statement got the world thinking. He really couldn’t be joking could he? Was there really life out there? And if it was indeed there, how would it feel about not being given adequate space by Robert Whittaker? Suddenly, Whittaker’s model felt like another prom dress, and another wise crack decided that it was time to create something greater than a Kingdom of Creatures: A Super-Kingdom called Tellurians which would include all creatures from Earth, contain the five Kingdoms of Monera, Protista, Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia, and still give enough room for aliens of all manners adequate representation, thus promoting both the inquisitive nature of all scientific pursuits as well as interplanetary democracy.
And thus we, my dear Tellurians, became Tellurians.
P.S: Believe the facts here at your own risk. Kindly verify before restating.
No comments:
Post a Comment